Marketer’s Guide To Location Data & Location Based Marketing

So as a marketer you want to know how location can help you to reach your marketing goals?

It’s time to take a serious look at location. Big data is tearing up the rulebook in a number of different industries. This trend continues with data-driven marketing becoming the new normal. Mobile has changed many things, but it’s having a huge effect on the way that markers are using data to reach their goals.

The missing link in this equation is location data. The rise in mobile adoption has provided a much better and accurate understanding of how audiences behave in the offline world. This location data is allowing marketers to do incredible things, based on cold hard evidence.

We’re going to look at some examples of location-based marketing. Get ready to see how you can use location-based marketing to create effective campaigns. Learn how to use location data to provide powerful insights and measure attribution with precision.

What is location data and big data marketing?

Location data can be seen as a branch of big data. When the term big data is used people generally think first about quantity. Whilst this probably has to do with the reason that the terms exist, big data isn’t really about quantity.

We think that data is big in the sense that the impact is big. We think of location data as big because of it’s quality in both application and insight.

With that in mind, we can define big data as the collation of data from multiple sources. To inform better decision making, powerful targeting and improved attribution.

Location data is big data that uses information about a person or group of people’s movement or behaviour. This is used to understand wider trends and patterns. Location-based advertising and marketing use this data to fine-tune marketing efforts. But it is also used to generate better engagement and get valuable insights into customer behaviour.

How can my business use location data

For marketers, it has sometimes been difficult to understand the benefits of location data. Especially whilst trying to get around the technical side of how it works. In the beginning, many companies had inaccurate data sets. But now the science behind location data has advanced greatly. This enables marketers by providing quick and reliable results. All by incorporating location data into their marketing strategy.

These uses are now much more accessible and easily combined with existing marketing efforts. Plug and play location-based marketing is now available. With this in mind let’s look at some of the key marketing practices that benefit from location.

Segmentation

Audience segmentation is a key challenge for any marketer. In order to optimize marketing dollars, it’s important to make sure that you are reaching the right people. It can sometimes be difficult to get this right, and often involves a lot of hypothesising and testing as well as optimization.

Location can help to build powerful audience segments as it’s a key indicator of intent. For example, let’s say you make the active decision to walk into a specific location in a shop. It is then likely, at some level, for you to be interested in some of the products in that location.

Location can also be used to build historical audiences based on location history. This means that you might target a group of people who are health nuts. You’ll have many ways of doing this currently. But location adds something that isn’t possible through traditional targeting options.

You can build an audience of people who visit gyms twice a month and have been to a dedicated health and fitness store in the past three months. If you have a strong idea of the type of target audience your product sits well with then location is a powerful tool for identifying custom segments.

An important point to make is that these audiences can then be used in the way that best suits your needs as a marketer. You can target them through social or send the data straight to a trading desk, DSP, DMP or other ad network. You can use it to overlay custom audiences to understand overlap. You can even use location to see the accuracy of your existing audiences and targeting.

Improve your audience segmentation

Targeting

Location tech is valuable for marketers because of the instant nature of data. Real-time insights allow targeting to occur in the moment, especially on mobile.

Location-based targeting is a powerful tool in any marketers arsenal. For targeting when users are in the right frame of mind for conversion, location is effective in driving engagement.

But location-based targeting is great for physical businesses with products in the real world. The ability to target audiences when they are either geographically close or in the right moment, location can be very effective in driving footfall or driving brand engagement.

An example is a location-based campaign that targets users when they are close to a physical store of venue. When the user enters a pre-defined location they are given a message that informs them of the CTA that is nearby.

This can be in form on a push notification via a third party app on their phone. But it’s also possible for marketers to feed this real-time data into existing media buying tools that can deliver ads via other programmatic media. As long as this is real-time the audience is still in the relevant moment and therefore effective.

These kinds of campaigns get much higher engagement and conversion rates. Marketers can use location data to ensure that their real-time targeting is effective. With location, you’ll also get insight from these kinds of campaigns. These insights can help you to optimise across your entire marketing department.

Attribution

This is an area where location data is offering unique insights for marketers. The ability to measure the effect of advertising in the offline world is a relatively new concept. Especially at a level that rivals the detailed insights that are readily available in the digital realm.

Measuring OOH

OOH, real-word adverts are big business for marketers. But there’s always been a problem – how do you measure the results? It’s difficult to attribute store visits or purchases to OOH. It’s also difficult to understand exactly how many people are exposed to the advertising in the first place.

Location data makes these insights accessible. By listening to areas around OOH it’s possible to measure how many people have passed or remained close to the OOH advert. From this data, you can create insights on how many people have been ‘exposed’ to the OOH ad. Of course, this isn’t perfect as there’s no guarantee that everyone walking past saw or understood the message.

But location data makes it possible for marketers to then measure how many of these people perform the desired goal. This may be that they visit a retail store associated with the ad. This is an effective tool for marketers to be able to measure, test and optimise OOH advertising.

Measuring experiential or other offline advertising

Of course, this tech can be used to measure other forms of advertising. Take experiential, for example. Usually, these campaigns end with the consumer leaving with a sample of some kind. But attribution doesn’t come easy and many campaigns end with the basic insights. These are usually how many people visited the experiential stand, or how many samples were handing out.

But location data enables marketers to then say, with great precision, this many people engaged with our experiential stand. You can then identify the percentage of these people that visited the store within a certain period of time.

These insights are invaluable. They provide marketers with the opportunity to get digital insights on traditional offline marketing campaigns.

Measure the effect of digital advertising on offline goals

For example, if you have a Facebook campaign you will have an idea of how many people saw your ad and even how many of these clicked your ad. But if your conversion is in the offline world, ie visiting a physical store, then this is where your campaign traditionally ends.

Sure there are some things you can do to pick up customers on the other side, like offer codes or loyalty schemes. But none of these will offer the same precision or reach as location data-driven marketing attribution.

Using location data marketers can understand the offline effects of digital advertising.

Do attribution better, with location

Insight

For marketers, getting those insights on a micro and macro level are crucial when creating your strategy. In terms of insight, data is the new normal. You want to base your marketing decisions on data that is accurate and instant.

Understanding the customer is critical to any marketing department. Location intelligence is a powerful tool in the area of customer analysis. Try enriching customer data with demographic and anonymous lifestyle information. This allows marketers to create more effective databases and be better placed to predict where best to spend marketing budget.

For brands with a physical venue or store location data can provide powerful insights into business performance. Understanding footfall and trends can help to inform on the ground business strategy. For example, retail location data can also help strategise how best to compliment physical retal stores with digital advertising.

Combine this with the ability to see data on competitors and other physical location and you have a powerful toolkit that marketers can use to put data at the centre of their decision making.

Personalisation

For marketers, a key goal is to try and personalise the relationship between brand/product and the consumer/user. Of course, this can be difficult as it’s not always easy to completely understand your audience. It’s even more difficult to personalise your communications based on this, especially on a one to one level.

But location intelligence can be one solution to the personlisation problem. Identifying the location of a customer can help brands and marketers to customise their message so that it is personal.

This could be a simple as including terms like welcome back in your messaging. Or you can create entirely different communication for customers that are in different locations or have demonstrated previous patterns of behaviour.

COmmunicating with your customers in this way can help to build stronger relationships and increase brand loyalty. This allows you to communicate with the right customer when they are in the right place with the right message.

How does location based marketing work?

Location data is sourced from mobile devices. Sensors are used to understand and pinpoint these devices. This process is anonymised so that the user’s personal details are kept private.

These sensors come in a variety of forms – from beacons to Wi-Fi to geofences. Using a combination of sensors allows for greater accuracy and better scalability of data.

Can validate the accuracy of the data they collect.

This means you’ll need to understand what types of location data there is. Some are more precise than others. Some are real-time and others are delayed.

Generally, a data provider that can explain to you their methodology and is transparent about their data sources is a good start. Look for sensor-driven data sources such as beacons, GPS or wi-fi. First party data sources are much better than third party, where the provider cannot validate the accuracy.

Can ensure that data is collected in a safe and secure way

Does your data provider have the correct opt-in procedures? Do they comply with current data collection legislation? These are all important questions that any good location-based marketing company will be happy to explain to you.